Tuesday, 18 October 2016

I recently finished my third novel, a literary ghost story
called The Thespian, which consumed
more than two years of my life, and for which I have yet to find an agent or
publisher. What if, like the novel I wrote before it, this novel never sees the
light of day? What is this lowly writer
to do? It’s answering this question that gave The Thespian its theme, its
heartbeat. What is the nature of art? And what, if at
all, does the relationship between artist and audience have to do with its
creation?

Art – Artist – Audience. Subconsciously I’ve been
thinking about this triangle for years, and it first germinated in my mind when
I was watching a news article about a violinist who had busked at a train
station only to be summarily ignored by the commuters. It transpired
that the previous night the violinist had played to a crowd of thousands at the
Royal Albert Hall. I didn’t know how I felt about this at the time,
but it became obvious that this news article had spoken something to me, and
that over the course of writing The Thespian I had been trying to
translate it.

Edgar Allan Poe talked about “Art for Art’s sake”. Poe’s
example of this is the writing of a poem purely for the sake of the poem, but I
see it a little differently, I see pure art as creating with no agenda, and
it’s for this reason I don’t believe there is such a thing as “pure art”, not
in the modern age, at least. If we imagine such a thing as “pure”,
then we also have to acknowledge the pollutants that can sully
it. Money, fame and ego have to be the major three pollutants, but
none of these things can apply the kind of corruptive pressure to an artist the
way an audience can, because an audience represents all three of these things,
all at once, and for an artist to truly create something pure, he or she would
have to create something with no audience in mind.

Imagine a sliding scale. At one end you have an
artist working on a masterpiece, a can of petrol and a box of matches waiting
beside his easel for when the painting is finished. And at the other
end, a writer furiously penning a raunchy Fifty-Shades knockoff while the
market’s still hot for it.

Whether the artist is a painter, sculptor, writer or
musician, he or she will be creating their art, to some degree, with an agenda
– perceiving their art, to some degree, through the lens of the
audience. And the funny thing is, the audience cannot be trusted,
because the audience is as corruptible as the artist because the audience is
under the illusion they have subjective opinion, but this opinion can be
manipulated in many ways – by others’ opinion for instance – friends or experts
or majority popularity. But by far the most interesting to me is the
corruptive power of narrative.

The chef, Raymond Blanc, is a true artisan of food – if not
an expert in wine, then certainly a man who knows his own mind. I
watched him taste a cider and declare it bland, but ‘Wait!’ says the wine expert
serving him, ‘this cider was produced by three men who learned to make wine as
prisoners of war, and when they were released in ’46 they started producing
apple wine, and from that came this, their very first
cider…’ Raymond Blanc smiles and tastes again: ‘I like it better
now,’ he says, and his smile says that he knows he has been manipulated, but
doesn’t mind.

Apply this formula to the violinist busking at the
station. The art he was producing for the commuters was the same as
for the patrons of the Royal Albert Hall, but the narrative surrounding the art
was different, and so the audience was corrupted. As I was
writing The Thespian, this merging of ideas regarding the nature of art
and the corruptive power of narrative seemed too perfect, almost as though the
first time I had seen the violinist article and couldn’t immediately pin down
what it meant, my subconscious had figured it out straight away and was feeding
it to me as I wrote.

So what if this novel never finds an audience? What is my agenda regarding my art? I’d love to say
that my art is pure, and that I create just for me and for the sake of the
work, but alas, I’m just like everybody else. A little money and
fame would not do my ego any lasting damage, and I’m just shallow and insecure
enough to want people to like what I’m writing, but what I have come to realise
is that I also love to write stories, and if nobody ever read them, I can
honestly say that I would still write them. There is something pure
in that at least.

Saturday, 3 September 2016

This week I was lucky enough to see Yerma at the Young Vic in London,
the new play starring Billie Piper. I
say lucky, because the play’s sold out now, and I feel like I’ve witnessed a
“moment” in time when people will look back and wish they too could have been
there. I’ve become one of those smug
types who say things like, ‘Yeah, I saw Hendrix’s last gig before he died.’ Yeah, I’m that
smug, but Yerma is that good, and Piper… sublime.

This isn’t a review of the play, because unlike books, and
to some extent film, I’m blissfully unaware of the mechanics that make up great
theatre. And yeah, I wrote a novel, a ghost story, on
the subject of acting and the theatre, but The
Thespian grew out of my love for this art form, and not my desire to know
how or why it works. I wish I could go
back to reading books in this way, to just experience an honest emotional
reaction without the intellectual assessment – to read a book the way I watched
Yerma: with tears in my eyes and
perpetually caught in mid-swallow.

They say in Hollywood
that it’s roles that win Oscars, not actors, and to this I partly agree. But could any actress have pulled an
Oscar-winning performance out of Blue
Jasmine? I don’t think so. As soon as I’d finished watching Cate
Blanchett’s performance I said to my self I’ve just witnessed this year’s Best
Actress Award winner. I felt the same
way about Billie Piper’s performance, and knew I’d just witnessed an Olivier.

But unlike film, you could see immediately how much Piper
had given of herself. When the players
came out to take their rightly deserved applause, Piper looked devastated, ruined,
unable to break from her character. She managed
the odd smile, but it looked crazy on her face.
She was still traumatized from her performance, and I loved her for it.

Yerma is the best
theatre experience I have ever had, and if you can beg a ticket from somewhere,
anywhere, you should do so, because if you don’t, one day you’ll bump into
somebody like me, and you’ll have to deal with, ‘Yeah, I saw Yerma when Billie
Piper was playing the lead, you know, the role that won her the Olivier…’

Friday, 15 April 2016

My new novel A Wish for Connie Harris, which is a Southern
Gothic fairytale for adults set in 1920s Louisiana,
and is a sort of a hybrid of The Road meets Big Fish, is shaping up nicely. Here’s a little taste of the opening:

I
met Connie Harris only briefly, a week ago today. We shared an afternoon together, drinking
lemonade beneath an old oak tree. I was
just a boy then, seventeen years old. A
week on and I am much older. That
particular afternoon was breathlessly hot, and though it is raining hard at
this moment, as I sit here on Connie’s porch with her axe at my feet and blood
on my hands, staring at where we once sat and drank our lemonade, I am sweating
still and breathless. Death always makes
me breathless, but it is such a part of life that the two cannot be
separated. Not by man. Not by God. To deny death is to deny
life. Connie knew this, and I guess now
I do too. Three lives have been lost
this week, and if there were such things as wishes, and I believe there are, I
would not wish them back. A week ago I
may have felt differently, but like I said, I was just a boy then.

There's a teleportation machine, and a boy that can fly, a murderer called Mackey, and a dog that won't die... What's not to like? I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Thursday, 25 February 2016

I watched the film Chaplin last night – the biography of the silent-movie legend Charlie Chaplin, starring Robert Downey Jr.It was all very interesting, but there was one scene that struck a chord with me in particular.

Chaplin (the director, not the tramp character), is struggling with a scene he’s directing. The female lead has to mistake Chaplin (the tramp, not the director) for a well-to-do gentleman, only the woman is blind and the movie is obviously shot in silence.A problem.Now, because the whole plot is hinged on the incorrect assumption made by the female lead, Chaplin (the director) feels he cannot cheat the audience with a flimsy incorrect assumption, or ask them to turn a blind eye (no pun intended) to the implausibility of the mechanics.Chaplin doesn’t want the audience to say, I don’t believe that.

He not only solves the problem, but solves it with elegance:The blind girl is sitting on a busy street corner selling flowers, and Chaplin, trying to get to the obstructed pavement, steps through the back of a parked car to emerge on the street in front of the girl.The girl thusly assumes he has exited the car, and therefore must be a gentleman of some standing, etc…

It needn’t have gone like this.The dialogue card has the girl address Chaplin as Sir, anyway, so he could have just been walking by for the incorrect assumption to be made, but it’s lazy, and even if it’s only on a subliminal level, the audience will know it’s lazy, and the story will be weaker for the, I don’t believe that, moment.

It’s the same in written fiction.Plot-heavy genre fiction more specifically.A carefully contrived plot can be softened with elegance.Characters needn’t be shunted around with a cattle prod but subtly directed by a conductor’s baton.Chaplin’s way is elegant because the path he takes through the back of the car is in keeping with his cheeky-chappy characterisation, so it feels like the plot is following Chaplin and not the other way around.It’s all device of course, but it should be artful.The actor’s goal is to hide the performance within the performance.To give the illusion of spontaneity.To not be seen to be acting.